Boons

+SPD allows her to hit 35 speed- 38 with Weirding Tome attached, before her A slot is taken into account. When coupled with her weapon's native Speed Ploy, this means that she can mitigate doubles, as well as effectively double other units.

+ATK supplements her already high attack and turns her into more of a oneshot nuke, allowing her to hit units harder. If not running Desperation, then giving her an Attack boon would be beneficial, as it helps her to KO red DC users without dying to their physical retaliation.

Neutral

RES is a good stat to have neutral, though it can also serve as a boon to further her Ploy abilities- you definitely don't want a bane in this if possible.

Banes

-DEF does very little for her and losing it doesn't affect her magical matchups or her desperation doubles at all.

-HP is similar, with the added bonus of allowing her to proc Desperation easier.

With this build, Lute is able to run Arvis' triple ploy build to an even greater extent than he can- as a matter of fact, this Lute will actually be immune to Arvis and hit him with her own RES/SPD/ATK -5. With a Fury, her Resistance hits a staggering 37 allowing her to effectively triple ploy the majority of units in the game.

She functions here as the ultimate debuffer, which goes nicely with the fact that she can also hit 53 atk/38 spd unbuffed. Her low HP works out to her advantage, as it will only take two fury procs to send her into Desperation, provided she takes no damage- if she does take damage, she'll likely hit desperation range after the first combat. Lute can then safely double any unit with comparable speed to her, provided she gets off that handy speed ploy proc from her native tome.

Running triple ploy makes Lute a great damage/support hybrid for your team, as she is capable of debuffing most units in the game to a crippling amount and can set them up for kills from your damage dealers or defensive wins from your tanks. She mitigates threats and makes the baddies easier to take care of. While her low hp makes tanking Moonbow/Quickened Pulse +10 Reinhardt a bit of a risk, she can easily do so if she hits him with Atk Ploy or if she gets a Resistance buff.

Fury is a no-brainer in addition to this, as she could use dramatic improvement to her speed and res and the self-damage inspires Desperation procs. Desperation works nicely if Lute is capable of securing doubles via debuffing the enemy or receiving buffs herself, however, in a DC heavy meta, Windsweep is also an option that will allow her to safely attack into units like Ryoma, Ayra, Hector, and other units that have inherited DC.

Rally Spd/Def helps the units that most easily pair with her: red counterparts that need to be able to counter the physical green units that counter her. Finally, Iceberg is a fantastic special to supplement her high res while retaining a low enough proc rate that she's likely to use it throughout your matches.

This is the default blue bladetome kit that you have probably seen applied to Mae, Delthea, Linde, Olwen, and now Lute. Due to blue mages having similar stat lines, the set works about the same on all of them, give or take a few points. In comparison, Lute has the same attack value as Mae and Delthea and she has 1 more Attack than Linde. Conversely, Lute has 1 more Speed than Mae, 4 less Speed than Linde, and 2 less Speed than Delthea. The tradeoff is that Lute has more Resistance than all of them, with 4 more than Mae, 7 more than Linde, and 3 more than Delthea.

That was a lot of numbers all at once but it basically boils down to this: Attack-wise, Lute is among the best Blarblade users, Speed-wise, she's worse than Linde and Delthea. Resistance-wise though, she's the best and will still be able to function as an anti red mage and still has the option to proc Res Ploy and hit with a moderate Moonbow, despite Life and Death's debuff which takes her down to 29 Resistance.

With all that being said, Lute hits 40 neutral speed with a +SPD IV and Life and Death, giving her 43 Speed with a Seal and 47 Speed if she has a buffer on her team- more than enough to take anyone down with an Attack of 54 and the ability to have her damaged buffed by bladetomes. It's cookie cutter, but it works for a reason.

Introduction

The meme who carried you through Sacred Stones, xx_l00t_xx makes her debut in Fire Emblem Heroes to 360 noscope Veronica's goons and study plants and be- well, superior.

She starts that off rather well by presenting a superior BST of 151- higher than most other mages- which makes her a little easier to run in the arena without suffering much of a hit to your overall score. As far as her actual performance goes, while her nuking potential is remarkably decent, she's not quite as effective as Linde or Delthea in becoming a purely offensive powerhouse. Instead, she relies on her remarkably high resistance stat to both debuff the opponent as well as tank through a variety of magical hits. This makes her rather versatile as both an enemy and player phase magic user.

Unfortunately, red mages are still somewhat absent from the meta, but her massive res stat means that she'll have the upper hand in most fights against blue mages, as well as giving her a leg up when it comes to low-res green mages (such as Merric, Inigo, or Boey).

Lute's prf weapon, the Weirding Tome complements her abilities incredibly well, both by supplementing her speed with a +3 boost and applying a -5 speed debuff to all enemies with lower res than herself in all cardinal directions. This allows her to massively increase the pool of enemies which she can double and, when combined with her natural Res Ploy, can help her to secure KOs against even the toughest of units.

Her stat spread is incredibly flattering and her attack and res mirrors units like Sanaki, Julia, and Arvis, while her speed and prf weapon puts her in an even higher speed tier than all of them. This comes with the tradeoff of being one of the most physically frail units in the game, so take care when deploying her.

Strengths

High Attack and Res

Lute's Res is her best defense and her greatest weapon, as her ideal build uses it to apply a myriad of debuffs to an opponent using the Ploy skills.

She also utilizes this to tank through significant enemy threats that could otherwise tear through your team.

Similarly, her attack isn't anything to sneeze at either and makes her entirely capable of taking care of enemy units.

In this regard, Lute functions as a blue version of Sanaki or Deirdre, but with even higher base speed.

Excellent Weapon

While it may be tempting to slap a bladetome on her, Lute's default tome actually offers her a lot of bonus utility, both in giving her the ability to debuff opponents' speed as well as increasing her own speed, all tied up with 14 mt.

This patches up her middling speed nicely, opens up her kit for a Ploy-centric debuffing build, and gives her an impressive player phase with good positioning.

Well Balanced Stats

Lute's entire statline is rather impressive. With her prf equipped, her stats reach 33/50/35/16/34, making her incredibly geared toward magical battles.

She has more speed than most comparable bulky mages, more res than any other reasonably speedy mage, and is has the second highest magical attack in the game.

She's an incredible magical tank tank, a fantastic player-phase attacker, and a great debuffer, all in one.

Weaknesses

Low Defense

Being minmaxed like she is has its downfalls: Lute is insanely weak to physical attacks. Her HP and Defense are both incredibly poor, making her very weak to physical attacks.

Her speed helps to mitigate doubles against her, but it only takes 49 neutral physical damage to one shot KO her.

This means that she typically needs to oneshot most DC units or she'll be killed upon retaliation.

Average Speed

When compared to units with similar attack and res, Lute's speed is much higher, however, compared to the rest of the metagame, her speed is on the lower side of the spectrum for a speedy unit.

35 isn't going to be doubling most units, and you can forget about doubling anything if she doesn't manage to hit her opponent with a speed ploy.

Without investing resources into salvaging her speed, the most she can do against other speedy units is hope to one shot them.

Relies on her Resistance

Lute has naturally high Resistance stat, which she relies on to proc her multiple ploys. However, against opponents with higher resistance stats than her, she can flounder.

Units with 31 RES or above (units who can use Fury to achieve 34 res) will give her trouble, as she will not be able to reliably land her Ploy skills against them without some kind of help.

Team Options

Lute functions as a versatile blue magic user that can cover your needs for a debuffer as well as a magical nuke. She's capable of surviving and counter-killing many magical meta threats on enemy phase and nuking physical units on player phase.

Distant Counter Reds: She functions very well with units who can be used as a human shield for her. In particular, units such as Ryoma, Black Knight, or Ike, who can all utilize their DC weapons to kill enemy green mages as well as green infantry units who will undoubtedly make a beeline for Lute.

Counters

Due to her poor physical bulk, Lute is easily taken out by strong Defense-targeting opponents. This is especially true for units that utilize the skills Distant Counter, as Lute will have to rely on one-shotting them in order to not take significant damage if not outright die on their counterattack. In addition to this, magically bulky units can also create problems for Lute. Not only are they able to mitigate her damage output, they can avoid her debuffs due to their extraordinarily high Resistance.

Magically Bulky: Greens such as Anna, Fae, Julia, and notably, Deirdre are prime examples. Deirdre has higher base Resistance than Lute as well, meaning that Lute can not only fail to proc her debuffs against one, but will be vulnerable to being ployed herself.

Strong Physical Attackers: She also has significant trouble against bows and daggers- most bow units will be able to one shot KO her if they initiate on her, and Lute has to be careful to ensure a KO if she initiates on one of them. Even then, ranged physical units with high resistance could fail to be oneshot and kill her on retaliation: units such asB!Lyn, Innes, and H!Sakura.

Distant Counter Users: DC units in general are scary for her if she fails to one-shot them and Hardin, Black Knight, Hector and Effie can easily kill Lute in return.

We keep the Weirding Tome for obvious reasons; boasting an a high 34 Resistance, 37 with a Resistance boon, allows her to ploy good number of the Heroes in the game, reducing their speed by 5 while granting you a boost of 3 Speed. This allows you to double more Heroes, allowing you to nuke without the need of help.

Fury is here to boost your Resistance to 37, 40 with a boon, and your Speed to 35 or 38 with a boon. But, it's mostly here to fix my Attack bane (especially since I didn't want to pull another one). With Glacies, you'll kill just about anyone except for the most inflated HP heroes.

Renewal is meant to heal the damage back from Fury and with Ardent Sacrifice/Reciprocal Aid, function as a combat medic if need be. You can run Desperation if you want, but expect to lose a lot of HP quickly.

Her native Res Ploy with Atk Ploy Sacred Seal and her tome all combine to give you that sweet triple ploy action that crumbles even to mightiest of heroes. Even Atk Ploy 2 Sacred Seal or even 1 can still work.

She is superior after all. Stats are including an S-rank summoner support. Terrible IV roll but still doubles a majority of the roster with her intense ploy abilities and high res. For the special slot, Glacies and Glimmer are interchangeable but I like being able to do more damage quicker